Alicia Acebo, CEO of Rock/Paper/Data, along with Supra Dey, Chief Technology Officer at Universal Orlando, described how Universal evolved their BI capabilities to be ready for their new theme park for Harry Potter. To set the mood, a fun video of the Universal theme park was shown.

Supra begin their BI planning about a year ago. All the usual problems (fragmented data, inconsistent reporting, etc). Harry Potter (the theme park) is coming! A game changer! Faster decisions, more data, need real time to manage the demand. It is a challenge of building a theme park within a theme park. Need to understand the HP business at an enterprise level. For instance, when the Simsons open, it changed the traffic patterns. Must evolve to operational BI to do the hour-to-hour management of the park. Various biz units (operations, merchandising, food/beverages, etc)

Alicia described the project stages. Build a subject area once and use many times. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So, one subject area at a time. She continued to describe her execution of a good data modeling methodology: data discovery, data dictionary, transformation, BI with governance over all. It is an evolution.

They are using the Teradata DW as the enterprise DW and various data marts, all on a single platform. Their enterprise data model (using ErWin) was simplified and partitioned into major subject areas. This aided the understanding by business users of the potential of data. Used a SAS portal and SAS OLAP Server on top of the Teradata DW. Supra showed a variety of detailed analytic reports.

Lesson Learned: current industry wisdom does work, such as upper mgt support, right team with experience, using the right platform, securing business involvement and having the right organizational culture

Challenges: under-estimated sales effort to IT and business, under-estimated business user support, training is not enough, conflicts with other business priorities, not having a dedicated team.

This session was an excellent example for BI newbies on how to do it right. Using the business of a theme park was a delight way to convey these fundamentals. Also, it is great to see Alicia recasted from Continental Airlines to Disney to her own company. Yea, Alicia!

[Blog stream from the Teradata Partners Conference is here.]